


Knowing Is The Easy Part

by lonelywalker



Category: Brimstone
Genre: Gen, Yuletide 2007
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-19
Updated: 2011-04-19
Packaged: 2017-10-18 09:28:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/187443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes you just have to take a deep breath and squint into the sunshine and make sure you know where your gun is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Knowing Is The Easy Part

The Christmas before you were born, I helped a dead man chase demons through a snowstorm.

It was that time of year in New York - those winter days when the airports close down and our morgues are filled with the unlucky homeless. Things were winding down at the office as the number of seasonal decorations steadily increased. People left for family gatherings out of state. My towering heap of paperwork reduced in size for the first time in months. It was obviously time for some kind of karmic balance to be restored. And, naturally, I got a phone call from Ezekiel Stone.

I think you've seen Zeke a couple of times. Glimpses, maybe, before your Mom hurried you off to bed. It's not that he's a bad man. He's one of the nicest, most honest guys I've ever met. If anything, he'd be a good role model for a kid. But... Well. It's difficult to explain the "but", and that's why it was always easier to send you to bed than to tell you about Zeke. I'm going to try to tell you now.

Ezekiel Stone was one of New York's Finest. A good detective. Nothing spectacular, but when did you ever hear of a spectacular detective outside a television show? We do our jobs and we get to go home to our families. That's enough. Back in the eighties, Zeke was shot in the face and killed by a criminal he was trying to apprehend. Not his fault. It's the kind of thing that could happen to any of us. It's the kind of thing I try not to think about. I do my job, and the job is worth doing. I think you understand that.

You might think that the man you've seen flickers of on cold New York nights seems very much alive, even if he could do with a shower and a shave and a change of clothes. Maybe you're guessing that, these days, people can die - technically, at least - and come back to life. I've seen that happen. I've had victims who seemed stone dead suddenly gasp and start talking as if it were the most natural thing in the world. But, no, that's not what I mean.

You might guess that someone can get shot these days, even in the face, and still look fairly normal. After all, reconstructive surgery and skin grafts are better than they've ever been. A guy can be shot and get lucky. And you've only seen him in the darkness. Maybe there were scars that you didn't quite see. You'll have to trust me when I say that Zeke doesn't have a scratch on him.

Ezekiel Fall was shot, and killed, and buried years before I found him walking and talking in New York City. What happened in between his death and his apparent resurrection? Zeke says that he spent it in hell. The real hell, not just the urine-soaked junkie apartments I crash through on a daily basis. Fire. Brimstone. All of it. I'm a smart man - not really college smart, but I know crazy when I hear it. Zeke's story really was crazy as all hell, but I knew that he wasn't. You have no idea how many times I've wished that he was. So just bear with me, kid. If this freaks you out too much, just call it a fairytale and pretend that I've had too much to drink. It wouldn't be the first time.

Ever since I crossed paths with Ezekiel Stone, I've been pulling double duty. Zeke may be dead, but he's still tracking down criminals, of a sort. Imagine that we had one prison in New York that held the most violent, deranged, strong, and smart killers in America. And imagine that there was a massive prison break. It would be pretty bad. You can see the news coverage now, the SWAT teams that would be out there combing the country hours after it happened, and the honest citizens who would be terrified of those killers out there on the loose.

Well, that prison break happened, except not exactly in the way I described. Instead of the craziest killers in America right now, the prison held the worst criminals the entire world has ever seen, since the beginning of time. One hundred and thirteen of them escaped: psychopaths and murderers and rapists and pedophiles from every corner of the earth, from any moment in time. Some of them have been in prison for millennia, and prison changes any man. I think you might guess what hell can do to people.

Zeke's been there, and he can't feel pain. He can't be hurt. He can't be killed. And he was only there for a few years. He's still pretty much human. Still pretty much a regular guy. A _sane_ guy. The people he's trying to track down aren't people at all anymore. Some of them can fly. Some of them can burn holes through metal. Some of them can suck out your soul just by looking at you. No SWAT team can go up against that, and that's fine, because Zeke doesn't have a SWAT team. What does he have?

One hundred and thirteen superhuman killers on the loose. An oblivious world. An international crisis of proportions that dwarfs any known terrorist threat. Zeke has himself and, by some accident of fate, he has me. We don't even have God on our side. It's not much of a surprise. You know I haven't been to church in years. Haven't believed since I was a kid. It's tough to picture a God who would have created a world like this one. I guess it's always easier to believe in demons than in angels.

That Christmas, the streets were icy and my mind was on a hundred different things. Your Mom was four months pregnant. Just getting over morning sickness. Just beginning to show. I remember that it had hit me, that December, that I was going to be a Dad, and that the next year I'd be the one trailing around toy stores, wondering what the perfect gift could possibly be. I was supposed to spend the night watching sentimental movies and being boring and adult and happy.

"I've been having nightmares," Ezekiel Stone said as the phoneline crackled.

The office was almost empty, and no one was in the least interested in listening in on my conversations. "Nightmares? What does a guy like you have nightmares about?" After years in hell itself, there were surely very few things that could faze Stone.

A pause. "I'll be in the city in an hour. Meet me."

I hadn't heard from him in months, since long before your Mom and I got married. I had new commitments and responsibilities, and Zeke's war against the forces of darkness should have seemed more ridiculous than ever on that day. But I jumped for him like I jump for no one, and I met him in a busy bookstore because it was nearby and crowded and no one would pay too much attention to either of us no matter how bad Zeke looked.

He never looks any older. I suppose he _gets_ older. We all accumulate knowledge and experience and we change our attitudes as the years pass. Zeke learns as much as I do, but he still looks the same every time I see him, even though my hair is getting grayer and I'm never as fit as I was the year before. He's the best-looking corpse I've ever seen, I'll give him that.

I found him in the self-help section, chuckling at new-age theories. "You've been having nightmares?"

We're not friends. Not exactly. We got drunk once, or at least I did, when I first found out about hell and demons and the fact that Zeke regularly has conversations with Lucifer. We're friends by circumstance, not by choice - two kids in detention, two soldiers thrown together in a foxhole. Maybe he noticed my ring. He didn't ask about me. I didn't ask about him. We certainly didn't hug.

Zeke put his book back on the shelf, scratched the always-present stubble on his chin. "The boss says they're a clue."

"A clue that told you to come to New York?"

"It told me to come to you," Zeke said. "Anything weird on your desk?"

Ever since I had chased an undead priest through a disused subway, the stranger cases have tended to end up being passed to me at some stage or another. My more charitable colleagues term me "open-minded". I shook my head. "Nothing that's your kind of weird."

"Next best thing?"

We walked through snow made dirty by New York streets. A bright winter afternoon. I might have been cheerful. Zeke seemed happier than I did. But pretty much anything is better than hellfire, I guess. I almost wished that I had a baffling string of murders to tell him about - another piece to neatly fit into his puzzle board. But my desk was clean of everything but witness statements and court appearances and open-and-shut armed robberies.

"What did you see in the nightmares?"

Zeke stuffed his hands in his pockets, squinted up at the sun. "I don't know. Flashes. Something... Something bad. And I saw you running."

"Everyone gets nightmares. Dreams that don't make sense..."

"Not me. At least... My nightmares mean something."

"He told you that?"

Zeke looked at me. "You think he'd let me have good dreams?"

"Doesn't mean that they're significant."

"Oh, they're significant." Zeke met my eyes. "You know him. We both know him."

Lucifer. Satan. The Devil. Zeke's employer. Our boss. Somehow it's easier to imagine him as an embittered bureaucrat in a suit than as a fiery angel the likes of which human minds cannot comprehend. I've read a lot since I met Zeke - enough that I'm probably better read in demonic mythology than most university professors. I might not be the smartest guy, but I'm a detective, and I know how to investigate crimes, even the supernatural ones. Zeke tells me that the devil appears to him as a human man. Middle-aged. American. Bad haircut. Perverted sense of humor. I think I've worked with a few devils in my time.

I've never run into him, myself, although Zeke says I probably have at some point. Lucifer likes to play tricks, to trip you up, to make you skid on vomit and bash your shins and walk into lampposts. He'll have been the stupidest witness in the world; the new secretary who shredded my evidence; the petty criminal who took up my time year after year. _You might not know him, but he knows you, William Kane._

When I want to feel better, I try to convince myself that Zeke is a paranoid schizophrenic with overtly religious tendencies. It doesn't often work.

"What are you doing for Christmas?" I asked. There was nothing more I wanted to say about nightmares.

Zeke watched as his feet crunched through the snow. "It gets colder around Christmas," he said after a moment. "Darker." Just as I was lost for words, he lifted his head and smiled at me. "Ever work Christmas night at the station?"

"Christmas Eve, once."

Zeke laughed. "Fun times," he said, just as he raised a hand to stop me in my tracks. "Tell me what's wrong."

It took me a moment to even understand the question, maybe ten seconds before I jolted myself into action and scanned the scene before us. Part of me was irritated that Zeke was treating me like a rookie. Most of me was embarrassed because I felt like one. I hoped that this really was a stupid patrol test, and Zeke was only looking out for gang members or a dealer on a corner or an old lady about to be hit by a bus. I had only seen one demon in my life, and had no real desire to ever see another. The priest had kidnapped three terrified little boys, had murdered my partner, had damn near killed me. And he, Zeke reported, was far, far from the worst of them.

On a bright winter's day, with sunlight on my face, with religious iconography around us, with modern technology at my fingertips, the idea that some kind of supernatural monster might be lingering nearby was difficult to accept. But I've seen murders on Christmas Eve. I've seen evil done to good people in broad daylight. Sometimes you just have to take a deep breath and squint into the sunshine and make sure you know my fingertips, some kind of sup where your gun is.

I was ready to fight, ready to call for backup, ready to do whatever was necessary. I'll admit that I've been an idiot about that sort of thing in the past. I was a runner in high school. I guess it translated to a pretty foolish desire to never let anyone get away. Chasing Zeke, once, that desire had almost got me killed. But sometimes, you know... sometimes you have to take that risk.

But nothing on the street seemed wrong or out of place. There were certainly no assaults taking place, no one screaming for help, no one sacrificing goats or shooting fire out of his eyes. I know you might laugh at the idea, but after a few years as a cop you really do pick up some kind of sixth sense, you begin to understand when something doesn't fit, you start realizing what's going to happen a moment before it does. At that moment, though, I could do nothing but fail Zeke's test.

I met his eyes again. "What?"

Zeke paused before answering, and shook his head first. "Nothing. You should be getting home. Sometimes nightmares really are just nightmares, right?"

"But your nightmares mean something," I said, and my thumb very consciously rubbed my wedding band. Maybe he saw it, too. "What's out there?"

 _What's out there?_ The answer has become obvious over the years, and the details don't shock and surprise me as much as they once did. I'm a detective, after all. I don't need to be told how to catch criminals, even if the methods I've had to use have frequently been more unusual and more extreme than cuffs and a gun.

Your Mom found me in the ER early the next morning, concussed and seeing double and still shivering. My clothes, what were left of them, had been half burned away. I was icy cold and dripping wet. I could still smell incense in the air, even as all the nurses insisted it was only industrial cleanser. I had to thank the Lord for the head injury. It spared me from having to tell anyone the truth, for having to fill in the gaps, for having to mention Zeke to anyone at all.

Over the following weeks, I used the Christmas holiday to sit in an armchair and munch aspirin and ignore voicemail messages from a Detective Ash in LA. Bible passages made me flinch, but it wasn't such a bad vacation.

I didn't hear from Zeke until March - just a long enough period of time for me to resume my denial where I'd left off, settling back into the comfortable groove of police work and family life. Maybe I should have told him to go to hell, that third time around. I couldn't get the words out.

I know I've talked to you about duty before. I know it's a scary thing to hear at your age, when it's your right to have fun, to play without worrying too much about the future. But I think it's important that you know why I became a cop, that you know why I've thrown myself in the way of knives and bullets and hellfire. I think it's important that you know why I go when Zeke calls, even though this is his mission, not mine, even though I get older and get hurt and wake up bleeding while he remains young and strong and resolutely the same.

At some point in your life, kid, you're going to start to understand that there's something out there that's bigger than you. For me, that's the sense of being a police officer and being able to protect people. It's being a Dad and watching out for you. And, ever since I met Zeke, it's been something more. It all matters, now, every action you take, every step of the way.

One day I know I won't be coming back home to you. Maybe the man who gave you this letter is sort of grubby-looking, unshaven, the kind of guy who looks like he's been wearing the same clothes for decades and desperately needs a shower. Maybe he's waiting for you now. If he is, I want you to remember that I love you very much, that I'll see you again, and that there is only one question you ever need to be asking in order to make me proud of you:

 _What's out there?_

Knowing has always been the easy part.

Go get 'em, kid.


End file.
